


I have been half in love with easeful Death,

by perfectlight



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-22
Updated: 2013-08-22
Packaged: 2017-12-24 06:53:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/936716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectlight/pseuds/perfectlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They taught her she was a weapon, sharper than pain itself, because of those hearts. She never learned how to die because they never taught her to fail – inconsistency.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I have been half in love with easeful Death,

**_I have been half in love with easeful Death,_ **

 

Dying, she thinks, is nothing like falling asleep. Sleep is heaviness, sinking deep, aligning of bones and languid settling. Cloying and clutching at a forgetful darkness, faded mirrors of color that were never real. 

 

(Humans spend a long time trying to seek out the meaning of dreams. When they cannot, they seek out the source. Eventually they stop caring. River never does.)

 

Dying is nothing like sleep.

 

It was a lesson, long ago, for a girl with two fumbling braids instead of a woman with crackling curls –  _pain is inescapable; use it, then_. She taught herself – or they taught her – oh, it doesn’t matter anymore – to tone pain and twist it and make it her weapon, her knife. Carve it along her brittle edges and slice herself into wakefulness, into fury. The pain, then, wakes her up, brings her back. Slices white on her vision, glaring sparks and boiling stars. 

 

But they never taught her about stopping hearts. Slow thuds, languid thuds, syrup blood and mind fading at the edges, creasing and yellowing like ancient parchment. They taught her she was a weapon, sharper than pain itself, because of those hearts. She never learned how to die because they never taught her to fail – inconsistency. She’s not dying properly, but she really doesn’t care.

 

Red wafting above her, pale face, sculpted face. Amy. She began watching that face, and began again seeing it grow, and to end when it is completed has a wisp of poetry to it, maybe. Rory is back and forth and crying her name and tottering on the line between nurse and centurion, father and friend; she can see the waver in his face, the creak of light past the door shielding nearly two thousand years, see the flickering shadows of another life behind his familiar eyes.

 

“Melody,” he whispers, but the whisper is also a cry, and he is creased in face and voice by horror. _Melody_ , not River – a slip, a mistake, and, oh, she treasures it like stardust. 

 

The heartbeats are slowing, now, fading into a pale cadence, the twisted whisper of a pattern. And in it she hears the poetry of her endless days, the crash of the discordant rhythm – a shattered melody, ending now.

 

Wetness on her face, needling past her lips – bitter, salty. Tears, perhaps, or blood. There is red, still writhing; red hair, or red blood, all around her – shared blood, Mum and Dad, and everything they never had been. River never had been ginger. Or if she was, she’s forgotten.

 

Giving death had long ago been her greatest gift, her single purpose, _bespoke psychopath_ – still the words twine through her mind, on the worst days. Once she was a monster, gorging; drunk on the sweetness of death, the eloquence. Creating life was nothing to taking it, to having the power and knowing the power of pulling life from a casing of flesh. She had reveled in it, sang of it, and felt smiles slicing into her cheeks when they cowered, screamed – she was death, and is now dying, and is a horror, and it had been wonderful.

 

It still lurks in her, lies restless, hissing – a shadowy Typhon eking through her blood. But now that blood is pouring and sweeping out around her (there was scarlet on the white of Amy’s hands, her mother’s hands, where red should never be, and that is how she is sure), and she feels the last of the madness drain with it, and is surprised to still be River when it is gone.

 

And then again, Melody Pond had been the monster. River Song was so much more. A mirror, but brighter – bursting like a sun, and now fading, and there was pale darkness webbing the edges of her eyes.

 

River realizes she is screaming. Strange – she can’t feel the hurt, if it is still there. It is irony piling and spilling into shock: at last she should be the master of pain, while she dies. But everything about her has always been a paradox.

 

When she sees the Doctor’s face, he seems to ripple past the shadows, and everything that had been blackness twists to show those eyes. As though the darkness had birthed him, and in a way, River knows, it had.

 

Tragedy is simple, elegant in a chaotic beauty as it crashes down around her. Laughter, and joy – they were dangerous. Complicated. And so, so easily lost.

 

They had been happy, and they had hurt, and all the threads of every life they had lived together soar up and choke River now.

 

River thinks she has never truly seen agony on any face that could even hold a shade of what is on his face now.

 

And then the Doctor says, voice fragmented, wild – sieved and split by pain – tells her, “You can’t die here; you don’t die here, River, you don’t–” 

 

–breaks off, shatters like a dying star. His hurt torments her more than death ever could.

 

The understanding is a cutting light and River feels it slice her lips into a smile, stranger even than glee at causing death. So the Doctor knew how she would go someday – of course he knew. He always knows.

 

Some would call what he did next necessary – to keep the timelines intact, calm the sudden white-bright flare of distorted time, push back against burgeoning loops of paradoxes. _Doctors make people better_ ; something he said, something he’d taught her, there was a reason for every name. It was in character. It was for everyone. It was for time.

 

All lies.

 

Because in the curls of sharpest gold, between loops of streaking fire, as light pulses into her hearts and weaves together her skin, she is not here but in Berlin, kissing life into him as though they were a mirrored, distorted fairy story, and then she is not here but in white, and there is light that burns and she is crying, and there is not a solution yet, no brilliant plan, but there will be.

 

It is for her. It has always been for _her_ – for River, for Melody, for all she was and could be – she had known, but she hadn’t _known_.

 

When the light seeps away and the pain dissipates and River awakes again, she will slap him into the next dimension. And then she will kiss him until her father turns redder than blood.

**Author's Note:**

> I kid you not – this began as fluff. Then my thoughts formed a coup and this fic happened.
> 
> The title is, _surprise of all surprises_ , from the illustrious John Keats.


End file.
